March 24, 2004
Good Riddance to CorkI'm on the warpath. I'm on the warpath against corks-that hideously flawed enclosure that is to wine what that other hideously flawed product, called Microsoft Windows, is to the personal computer!
As you might guess, I'm a Mac user, but I also have a PC to kick around that I end up swearing at all the time-much like the owner did at his or her British Jaguar before it was bought and saved by Ford.
In the past week I had two bottles of corked wine, and that's a damned maddening experience. You go out and spend good money for a bottle of wine only to find it ruined by a bad cork! Imagine the collector who may have paid hundreds of dollars for a rare Burgundy, only to find it undrinkable because of a tainted cork!
All the time I have people ask me if a wine is corked. A corked wine is unmistakable. Hard to define though, and perhaps it is akin to what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote on obscenity in 1964,
"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . but I know it when I see it . . . "
"Corkiness" in wine, is hard to define, too, but you sure know it when you smell it!
A corked wine, according to the "The Oxford Companion to Wine," edited by Jancis Robinson, is pejorative. It refers to wine spoiled by a contaminated cork. The unpleasant and disagreeable odor is reminiscent of damp cardboard, mold, wet earth or the chlorine aroma of Clorox. The problem really became aggravated in the 1980s, and the industry has appeared to be unable to solve the problem. At least Microsoft can make patches available after the fact for its poorly written software! Wine drinkers are not so fortunate.
Cork comes from trees grown in Portugal. Corks are normally bleached in a strong chlorine solution prior to washing and drying. This process, according to "The Oxford Companion" can inadvertently produce a chemical compound called trichloranisole, or TCA, which can be smelled at concentrations of just a few parts per trillion.
It's unmistakable. Once you know what a corked wine smells like, you won't forget it.
It's important to note that "corkiness" in wine is not the winemaker's fault. The flaw comes from a bad cork enclosure. A number of local wine producers such as Lane Tanner and Buttonwood Farm, have gotten fed up with the flawed technology of the cork, and I don't blame them one bit!
I think the best enclosure is a screw top. All of Bonny Doon Vineyard's wines now come in screw tops. And that high-end producer of Napa cabernet sauvignon, PlumpJack, bottles with a screw top, for no less than $135 a bottle! And it sells at that price too.
Local winegrowers Rudi and Elise Van Enoo who have a vineyard off of Ballard Canyon Road in Solvang are releasing their very first estate grown 2001 syrah. Their label is called Van Enoo Vineyards. The wine retails for $36, and they bottled this premiere release with a screw top!
At an informal tasting with some friends back in December, my two favorite wines turned out to have screw tops: The Van Enoo 2001 syrah and the new Bonny Doon Vineyard 2001 Old Telegram ($32), made from mourvedre, a red Rhone grape from the south of France.
Last week I had another bottle of the Van Enoo syrah! It was as good as I remember it from December. It's a spectacular example of the varietal and well worth the price, and when you buy it, you have the assurance it will not tainted with a bad cork.
Wine stewards I have spoken to tell me the problem with serving a premium (and expensive) wine with a screw top like PlumpJack in a restaurant is the presentation. Like the bartender who ritualizes making a martini, there's a ritual in removing the cork from a bottle and presenting it to the patron. Snobs may have a problem with being served wine with a screw top, but consumers who want assurance the bottle of wine is sound with no "corkiness" should, and frequently do, applaud the superior enclosure.
Friend and winemaker, Brad Lowman told me, "Cork may be considered romantic, but corked wine is anything but! A corked wine can deflate any rising passion."
Last October, wine writer Matt Kramer wrote in the "Wine Spectator", "A wine shouldn't come from the winery already tainted. Which brings us to an uncomfortable ethical question: Is it acceptable to knowingly release defective products?
"...If you knew that 3 to 5 percent of everything you sold was defective-when it didn't have to be-could you look yourself in the mirror and whistle a happy tune?"
Some words in language I am sure will never change. There will still be a corkage fee when you bring a screw top into a restaurant. Compact discs are still made by record companies, and telephones still ring even though they really buzz or chirp.
Bon appetit!
Wine lover and Santa Maria Times Wine columnist, Bob Senn, lives in the bucolic Los Alamos Valley
